Finished
Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction (1981)
by Damon Francis Knight (September 19, 1922 - April 15, 2002), the American science fiction author
and master of the short story.

A practical book on generating, structuring, and pacing one's prose fiction.
Includes many effective exercises and examples.
See especially his chapter on viewpoint.

(3.26.2013)

Finished skimming
The Worst Hard Time (2006)
by Timothy Egan

The North American Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a man-made disaster when the topsoil blew away in five
central states, due to their ; a lack of rain on ploughed-up perennial grassland.

Wonderful to have a new book by Crace, one of my favorite authors.
Devoured it in the first two evenings I had it.
Though it's not as strong as his
1997 Booker Prize listedQuarantine.
or his
The Pesthouse,
with its North American population crash and nationwide organization collapse.

A collection of short stories about her private-eye protagonist, Kinsey Millhone,
together with stories about Kit Blue, letting the reader have a closer view of the author's
difficult childhood and early relationships.

Gives 80 kanji that they say will be sufficient kanji for the lowest level
JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). However,
a comment on the Amazon site for this book says that the full list of kanji you
have to learn to pass
"the first level exam (JLPT4) ... [is] 103 kanji ... as well as ... [about] 700 vocab words, and
[of course] basic grammar and listening skills."
Still, I am hoping that at one per day, in 3 months I might be able to recognize the JLPT4 kanji,
by studying this book and adding in the other JLPT4!

"Conversational style: the power of language in your life."
Includes amplitude (loudness), pacing (speed) and pausing, turn-taking, intonation (pitch shifts),
directness and indirectness, stories (topic and how you get to the point), joking, teasing, sarcasm,
how you show you are listening, and kinesics (physical distance, touch, body orientation, eye gaze, and
laughter).
While style is "automatic and invisible", we base upon it conclusions (presumptions?)
of "personality, intentions, abilities, or group stereotypes".

"Linguistic signals, devices, and rituals."
When conversational rituals are not shared, an utterance is interpreted literally.
"Complementary schismogenesis" occurs in a conversation between people with opposite styles,
with each escalating their style, as if that could alter the style of the other person
toward theirs.

"Framing and reframing: how meta-messages frame meaning."
"Framing" tells us how to interpret the meaning of the words we hear.
Jokes often depend on a shift of frame.

"Power and solidarity: the interplay of hierarchy and connectedness."
Includes choice of pronouns, use of first name versus title, etc. leads to:

Closeness plus hierarchy: e.g. Japanese amae; Javanese respect.

Distance plus hierarchy: e.g. American employer/employee.

Distance plus equality: e.g. Javanese formal/polite.

Closeness plus equality: e.g. American siblings.

"Indirectness: the ways and whys we communicate meaning not in so many words."
While indirectness can pay off by increasing self-defense or increasing rapport,
those who tend to use a different style might genuinely miss the speaker's meaning,
or understand it but resent the indirectness or the directness,
or erroneously attributed negative personality, ability, or intention to the speaker.

"The rhythms of talks: pacing, pausing, silence, and interruption."
"Differences in the rhythms of talk can lead to negative impressions.
When these patterns vary by culture and gender, they may result in speakers being
unfairly stereotyped."
Don't take differences in style personally.
Consider adapting your style to that of someone you are talking with.

"Listenership: conversation as a joint productions."
To show you're listening: appropriate eye gaze (women gaze more than men),
appropriate back-channel responses (sounds made to show you are listening, like "mhm,
uhuh, yeah", need to be enough to show attentions but not too many to show
impatience.

"Agonism: programmed contentiousness, ritualized opposition."
Significantly present in Western men's conversations; much less common in women's.
Many Asian cultures, however, place "negative value ... on the open expression of opposition."

"Gender: women and men talking."
"Women's and men's [different] uses of language can be traced to the way
boys and girls play. Boys (and men) focus on relative status;
girls (and women) focus on relative connectedness."
Women tend to make "rapport-talk" (including talking through problems)
whereas men tend to make "report talk" (including quickly offering a solution).

"Apologies in private and public contexts."
Men tend to be reluctant to actually use the words "I apologize", to see
apologizing as a degradation, and to make indirect apologies.
But apologizing smoothes a world of troubles.
So, try to accept indirect apologies (if you are the would-be recipient) or to actually
say the words (if that is what is needed from you).

"Talking at work: institutional and interactional power."
"Knowing about conversational style gives you more flexibility to improve
the situation if you feel you are not getting credit for your work or that your true abilities are
not being recognized. It is also incumbent upon managers and others in high positions to become
aware of conversational style differences in order to accurately judge the abilities of those who work under
their supervision, to bring out the best work from those they supervise"
while working with people with varying styles to serve customers who will also have varying styles.

"The classroom: talking in school."
Home style of conversation can lead to a need to educate a child about the different style of
interaction needed in the classroom.
Tendency for boys to take (and be given) power over girls in a mixed-gender situation.

"What to do with what you've learned."
"An understanding of conversational style and an awareness of that style as
employed by yourself and by those to whom you speak not only sheds light on human behavior but
increases the likelihood of communicating successfully."

(3.1.2013)

Concluded the 586-page On China (2011)
by Henry Kissinger.

One of the most grievous omissions is some kind of timeline, but perhaps Kissinger
is more the anecdotal than the scientific analyst.

Accordingly here is a timeline of
recent presidents of the United States of America along with number of pages indexed to them or their administrations in
On China:On China

Ribbons
(8, 3) Winter 2012 issue.
Includes a couple of
Tanka by J. Zimmerman,
part 1 of her essay on her Tanka Revision Workshop,
and
a responsive tanka by her and Beverly Acuff Momoi.

(2.24.2013)

Abandoned Paolo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2009),
partly because of the stilted writing (or perhaps Shaun
Whiteside's translation from the Italian?),
partly because I felt unsympathetic to the portrayed characters,
and partly because there was so much pain in the book that to continue
would for me have been masochistic.

(2.23.2013)

C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle (1956)
performed by Michael York.

The 7th book written in the Narnia seven-book series, and the 7th in the Narnian Chronology:
a fairly strong Christian analogy, which takes up time that could have been spent on story.
Basically, everyone but Susan goes to heaven.

C.S. Lewis' books read (in the sequence of the Narnian Chronology, as advised by
Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis):

The 3rd book written in the Narnia seven-book series, but the 5th one in the Narnian Chronology:
the two of the children (Edmund and Lucy) return with their feeble cousin Eustace to re-meet
Prince Caspian.
Eustace sees a dragon die, steals some of its treasure, ... and while he sleeps he is turned
into a dragon.

C.S. Lewis' books read (in the sequence of the Narnian Chronology, as advised by
Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis):

Reread
Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
in its 1936 version edited by Ezra Pound.
Written by Fenollosa before his death in 1908, the essay is an enthusiastic ramble.
On p. 5. he states:

Now my own impression has been so radically and diametrically opposed to such a conclusion [that
Chinese and Japanese "branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the
toil necessary for their cultivation"],
that a sheer enthusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share with other
Occidentals my newly discovered joy.

His rather rambling gist is that the visual information in Chinese characters
(and by extension, Japanese kanji)
adds an invaluable visual aspect to augment the meaning of the poetry.
To demonstrate he includes four lines of Chinese poetry and a handful of additional character.

Listened to
V is for Vengeance (2011)
by Sue Grafton.
Another satisfying book, well read as always by Judy Kaye.

The heroine Kinsey Millhone notices and reports a shop-lifting heist.
Then this multiple-viewpoint book is on a roll, with lots of interesting Goodies and Baddies dealing
with huge amounts of cash and of passions. The intertwined love plot is a little too sweet
but out gal Kinsey certainly takes the bitter — strangulated almost to unconsciousness by
a bad cop and punched out by the 'good' Mob guy, for example. And almost forgetting her
May 5th birthday.

C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
performed by Sir Anthony Quayle.

The 5th book written in the Narnia seven-book series, but the 3rd one in the Narnian Chronology:
the two of the children (Edmund and Lucy) return with their feeble cousin Eustace to re-meet
Prince Caspian.
Eustace sees a dragon die, steals some of its treasure, ... and while he sleeps he is turned
into a dragon.

John Pollack's The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun
Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay more than Some Antics
[semantics, geddit?] (2011),
in a reading by Pete Larkin.
Despite the wincibility of the author's title and subtitle, almost 5% of his examples were funny.

The first half has poems of California and is particularly good — strong and fresh juxtapositions —
and I'm always a sucker for haiku set in the Sierra!

The second half, set in New England, was good but seemed less strong.
Perhaps the poet had a smaller repertoire to select from, as he'd been in California for
several decades before moving back to New England.

This collection seems quite traditional. And very few senryu.

Some are brilliant, such as:

no one to tell
the alpine sky heavy
with thunderclouds
and
schoolyard snow
all the bullies
I have known

I was puzzled by one:

tug of her hand
a spring so small
you could miss it

After about 7 re-readings I am thinking they are walking together and she sees a little mountain spring
— as opposed to the tug being "springy" or some emblem of the spring (or capital-S Spring) season
(an early flower perhaps) being seen.

I've heard that it tells the story of a mentally challenged woman diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica.
But the clever stream-of-consciousness style (apparently learned from Woolf, Joyce, et al.)
was hard to get in to. As for the book's title, the book opens with a quotation
by James Joyce:

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

Then on pp. 374-5 (in Self's style of interleaved italics and non-italics):

They would titrate the dose differently ...
put up the umbrella
as much as the nurses required, but at all costs keep on with the trial
that's nothing of the sort.

And elsewhere:

night [is] an umbrella with starry holes torn in its cover.

(2.14.2013)

C.S. Lewis' The Horse and his Boy (1954)
read by Sir Anthony Quayle.

The 3rd book written in the Narnia seven-book series, and also the 4th one in the Narnian Chronology.

He defines his term "the bloodlands as territories subject to both German and
Soviet police power and associated mass killing policies at some point between 1933 and 1945"
(p. 409). As of 2010, these lands had become the center and east of Poland,
the western band of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg to the Sea of Azov),
all but the two small western patches of Ukraine, and the entirety of Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Belarus (as on map on p. 385).

A terrifying story of mass killings under the leadership of Hitler and of Stalin.

Of the 14 million people that Snyder reports as having being deliberately killed in the
bloodlands, he makes a summary (p. 411) that includes:

1932-33: "3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved
by their own government in Soviet Ukraine".

1937-38: 0.3 million "Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot
by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims
of the Great Terror of 1937-1938".

1939-41: 0.2 million "Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces
in occupied Poland".

1941-44: "4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and
Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers".

1941-44: "5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot
by the Germans".

1941-44: "several hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians, and Poles)
shot by the Germans in 'reprisals' chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw".

He compares his total (using "sums of counts made by the Germans or the Soviets themselves,
complemented by other sources, rather than statistical estimates of losses bases upon censuses.
Accordingly, my counts are often lower (even if stupifyingly high) than others in the literature")
with:

4 million "people who died in all of the Soviet and German concentration camps
(as opposed to the death facilities) taken together over the entire history
of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany".

12 million "German and Soviet soldiers, taken together, killed on the
battlefields in the Second World War (counting starved and executed prisoners
of was as victims of a policy of mass murder rather than as military casualties)".

1 million "American and British casualties, taken together, of
the Second World War".

1 million "American battlefield losses in all of the foreign wars that the United States has
ever fought".

Like Eng's subsequent
The Garden of Evening Mists: a Novel,
this book also explores the boundaries of loyalty and deceit before, during, and in the aftermath
of a time of war. Both books are set in the context of the World War II invasion of Malaya by Japan.
And both are told from the point of view of someone who is aging, with aging memories.

This book presents (a little more explicitly than the subsequent
The Garden of Evening Mists: a Novel)
how a spy can seduce someone into giving them information and how a collaborator can walk a jagged path
between helping the enemy, protecting his family and others he cares for, and supporting
in-country resistance fighters. The respect for a Japanese skill (in this book, akido; in
The Garden of Evening Mists: a Novel, Japanese gardening and archery)
allow us to admire something beautiful in the culture of the invading race.

Nothing in the Window: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2012 (2013)
edited by Jim Kacian and the Red Moon Editorial Staff.

Terrific collection, the 17th in the Red Moon Anthology series.

142 poems (English-language
haiku,
and senryu) published around the world in calendar year 2012.
Also 30 poems in linked forms:
haibun,
renku,
and
rengay,
and sequences.
And 3 critical pieces on the study of haiku poems and sensibilities.

It was great to see David Lanoue's enthusiastic review of Stephen Addiss' Art of Haiku:
It's History Through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters.
I bought a copy of this superb book at a local book store last year and am perusing it
at an enthralled yet leisurely pace.

Gratifying to see Paul Miller's review of three books by Robert Epstein, including his
The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss and Change (2012),
in which I have
haiku.
and
tanka.

Also intriguing is Eve Luckring's review of Lakes & Now Wolves (2012)
Scott Metz' first collection.

I admired the idea of a set of essays on senryu (if not all of the
essays themselves). Jane Reichhold's bold piece was particularly amusing if forceful to the point
of rant in places.

Finished dipping into Kate Summerscale's
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a
Great Victorian Detective (2008),
a recreation of the events surrounding an 1860
murder of a child (Francis Saville Kent).
The Moonstone (1868) was likely influenced by the
news and speculation at the time concerning the Kent murder.

A collection of insightful essays and speeches, particularly about his
deceased friend and comrade David Foster Wallace and about the destruction of wild birds.

(1.27.2013)

Abandoned Umberto Eco's
The Prague cemetery (2011),
also highly recommended but not for me.

(1.26.2013)

Finished dipping into William Gass'
On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976),
highly recommended but not for me,
even though blue is my favorite color.
Ok for people that are more interested in language than topic, but
the free-association is too loose for me.

(1.25.2013)

Finished dipping into Karen Elsa Sandness'
Japanese the Easy Way (1997),
a set of 18 practical chapters
on learning Japanese).

(1.24.2013)

Abandoned trying to listen to George R.R. Martin's
A Clash of Kings (1999) in a 2004 narration
by Roy Dotrice.

Psychopathic royalty on the loose in a mediaeval/fantasy view of tribal
culture; borrows on North-versus-South England versus Scotland versus Wales, etc.
But the writing is uninspiring.

(1.21.2013)

Jon Ronson's
The Psychopath Test: a Journey Through the Madness Industry.

A chatty pop-psychology book, written like a collection of short stories, each chapter concerning a
possible-psychopath in different circumstances (prison, business, etc).
The consensus reported by Ronson is that about 1% of the non-prison population,
about 4% of CEOs, and
about a third of the prison population are psychopathic.
Includes (pp. 97-98) the
"famous twenty-point Hare PLC-R Checklist" for identifying psychopaths.

(1.18.2013)

Finished listening to Henning Mankell's final book in the Kurt Wallender series
The Troubled Man (2009) in a 2011 narration
by Robin Sachs.

A poignant end-of-career story as dementia sets in.
A couple of coincidences too many, but otherwise a worthwhile read.